Rachel Getting Married

Not a false scene, note, whisper or glance in this brutally raw, honest, sweet and fierce film about the impossible complications that arise from being human and living with others. This is the picture that people should be praising as the best movie of the year.

Koko: Either you mean the best movie of last year, 2008, which would make it better than WALL-E, and that is impossible, or you mean of this year, 2009, which would make you Cassandra, because you can see the future and I don't believe you. Either way, the title commits crimes not fit to speak about in public.

Hey, James Blake is playing a Canadian in Australia. Whatever the outcome, I don't care.

Slothrop: It should be unmistakably clear to our faithful followers that Koko has yet to eat his banana and is grumpy and irritable and anti-Canadian. As for the movie, it's the best movie of 2008 and 2009 and since Rachel is still getting Married it'll probably be the best movie of 2010, too, by which time she should be well on her nuptials.

Slothrop: After the second viewing, I insist that whatever space capsule we sent to another galaxy that includes the best representation of what the humans can or have done, I insist this movie goes on that space capsule. Can I think of the aches and complexities and the rains and joys of life summarized more deeply than this movie? I cannot.

Koko: You also cannot explain the obnoxious multicultural wedding motif, or the bald Asian with the pink sunglasses, or the insistent, bad, obvious, small, sordid symbolism of the wedding band (music? love? a big black man to make everything clear?), or, for God's sake, the concluding, fifteen minute nuptial concert complete with drum procession, dancing ambiguous Arab woman, and some manner of hybrid crunk. These things annoy me, terribly, and you cannot explain them.

That complained, the script is deeply written and deeply felt, the acting heartfelt and serious--the way Hemingway described and defended the serious against the solemn, the rooks and eagles and bountiful sparrows against the gloomy owls--and the structure personal, novel, fine, aboriginal, and brave. At times the director's hand feels too heavy (take, for example, the crashed car and the highway sign, or the Kubrickian faux-scoring of the final window shot from Rachel's room, or, most loathed of medicines, the petty self-consciousness of musical interlude and intervention during our family's fight--God, take them all!), and to say what I really mean, the directing crept dangerously close--at times--to presentational and congratulatory, smirking and cynical.

That also complained, I think it shows unequivocally the work's seriousness--again that Hemingway word, that quality of crafted, caring, apprenticed storytelling--that despite these annoyances, Rachel Getting Married not only succeeds but does so seriously.

In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway recounts an episode with a matador who had broken his wrist during a bullfight. The arm was gored and the bone shattered, and all the narrator can summon in response is a dreary practical inquest:

"What about the wrist?" I asked.

"Fuck the wrist," was all he said.

Dangerous art, which is the most serious art, exposes itself and its author to the calculated trials of perfection. We are limited creatures, and all our accomplishments, intended to transcend our limits and redeem us with perfectability, only and always confirm our imperfection. The best art understands this and pursues its imperfection deliberately; it does not pretend to be clean or complete. Rather, it increases--according to the rules that protect it--the harm it risks in exposing itself to more danger than is necessary. We admire the chance it takes all the more for its futility.

While I didn't enjoy everything about the movie, I did admire it. And although from scene to scene, depending, apparently, on the extent of pink sunglasses and symbolism, I swung from wild melancholic rapture to bitter unbelief, interchangeably zealous and apostate, I never lost respect for the project, either in purpose or in execution. Superb acting, stunning writing, awful blue Hindu elephant cake:

I will watch it again, and admire it again, but I will fast forward through the endless hit parade, especially the "Wedding March" played on electric guitar by some fake hipster faux-hawk and his big-boned, Louis Armstrong-looking conspirator. The title, however, can stay. You were right.

Now, better than Wall-E? You're crazy. Talk to me after you've adopted a rabbit that looks like a robot. Until then you have no ethos with this crowd, Slothrop. All your appeals are in vain. So let me remind what you obviously have forgotten:

Christmas lights on a robot. Beat that.